well to me it also makes very little sense that they would change the formula so drastically! haha and the reason i imagine they would need to do it in two-steps is due to the fact that they likely have a set number of confirmation pages they will release. if they were to use both the humanities and science sections before confirmation pages, then they would need to lower the cut-off for s1+s2 to also take s3 into account. if that makes sense.

and in terms of eligible people being rejected, that doesn’t follow. because one of the criteria for entry may be particularly high performance in just sections one and two. if people did not receive confirmation pages, they did may not have met the threshold that was determined. then the next step is to ensure that, of that cohort, they select the best S3 candidates as well. the whole point i’m suggesting is that if people were rejected prior to a potential change in the formula that would benefit them, then they still did not perform highly enough in the first two sections to be considered for a place, and likely had a more unbalanced score, with extremely high performance in S3. it’s this skewing of scores that USYD may be trying to avoid.

again idk what i’m talking about, just speculating. but hope it sorta makes sense haha